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INSTITUTIONS |
Alberta Arts Institutions and Associations
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ASSOCIATIONS |
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Alberta College of Art and Design
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An interview with Les Graff, for Dreamers and Doers.
A job came up in 1960
with Alberta Culture so I was lucky enough to get that job.
That was in the fall of ’60 and I was there unit ’91 so there
is 31 years of working with Alberta Culture.
Alberta Culture as a
government agency was assisting individuals, organizations, it was
co-sponsoring with agencies, that kind of thing. So we were spread all over the province.
We were dealing with everything from pre-schoolers to
professionals, everything from little tiny school exhibitions through to
the shipping works of art to New York, London, and commissioning works
here in the province. As well
as teaching and putting out newsletters and so on. It was a very broad program, touching just about everybody at
that time. I resigned in 1991 to paint full time. So I have been out of touch since then to a certain degree. I still am teaching a little bit, but I’m certainly not touching base with as many factors as I was up until 1991. The first cultural
development act on the North American continent was passed in Alberta. And so you’ve got a government who says culture is
important. We’ll help
people with that. How do you do that? Well, first of all you
have to hire people and then you start giving courses out there which
means you develop the expertise of taking equipment out to a community,
teaching a course, short concentrated courses in whatever is needed.
Whether it’s painting or ceramics or weaving or whatever it was.
And you send out exhibitions and you send out slides and you offer
grants so they can buy equipment and you offer scholarships to people and
it goes on and on. So the government was
involved and from when I came in, it was 1960, the visual arts branch,
which it was known as at that time, was fairly well developed. It had two or three programs.
By the late eighties we had about 30 programs. We had probably the largest visual arts newsletter in Canada;
we had slide exhibitions and traveling exhibitions that nobody else in
Canada had ever equaled. And
we were looked at as being a leader right across Canada in terms of
cultural development.
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Alberta
Craft Council
Alberta Foundation for the Arts Visual Arts Alberta has an excellent list of Alberta arts organizations |
